Article ID: | iaor20052546 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 51 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 818 |
End Page Number: | 840 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2004 |
Journal: | Naval Research Logistics |
Authors: | Cai Xiaoqiang, Zhou Xian |
We study a class of new scheduling problems which involves types of teamwork tasks. Each teamwork task consists of several components, and requires a team of processors to complete, with each team member to process a particular component of the task. Once the processor completes its work on the task, it will be available immediately to work on the next task regardless of whether the other components of the last task have been completed or not. Thus, the processors in a team neither have to start, nor have to finish, at the same time as they process a task. A task is completed only when all of its components have been processed. The problem is to find an optimal schedule to process all tasks, under a given objective measure. We consider both deterministic and stochastic models. For the deterministic model, we find that the optimal schedule exhibits the pattern that all processors must adopt the same sequence to process the tasks, even under a general objective function